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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Redcine - Long output times

I've got an 8-core mac with 5GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card. Tried rendering out DPX files in both RedCine and Red Alert. Took 20 minutes to render out a 2K DPX sequence from a 1 minute R3D clip. Both Red Alert and Red Cine took the same amount of time. To render out a 4K DPX sequence from Red Alert took me 60 minutes.

Long render time indeed. Can either of these programs make use of a render farm?

Dave
 
Am I the only one shocked at these render times? After all the reading on this forum I must have missed something in regards to this timely step in the production chain. So it will take 20 or so hours to process an hour of footage?! Wow!
I suppose we won't all be handing drives over to clients at the end of a shoot, especially if shooting a few hours of footage a day, or with multiple cameras.
 
Wow.. Is it just me, or are we seeing the weak link here in regards to REDCine? I can handle a 3-5:1 render time (3min to 5 min for every 1 min 4k) but these speeds make the work just too slow to deal with in most situations that are paid.

So the question here is: How much of this is due to REDCine being in BETA? What kind of speed improvments can we expect over the next 2 months?

Jay
 
As I said.. I am not complaining to complain. But I am purchasing RED with the idea of working in many different fields.

That said, time matters. I am cool with the output times being slow for projects that require it.. BUT there are EFP times when we need to be able to output an hour's worth of material in 2-3 hours at LEAST.. It's also reasonable to assume that these may be more inline with 2k source files rather than 4k.. But time matters.. A lot.

I am surprise that with 100+ cameras out there, no one has mentioned this with REDAlert. What's the deal? Is that software that much different?

Jay
 
Sending film to the lab having it processed and then transfered to digital takes a day or more. IMO this render time is fast for a cine camera.
 
I don't see what the complaint is... I can't say how fast it would be on a current workstation or upcoming 8-core Penryn Mac/PC. I'm only running on a Macbook pro. I tried to load it up on an AMD dual-core system, but it crashed on me. I'll have to test and see if it is a REDCINE issue or just this flakey PC.

Anyway, times are not bad. Compared to processing film it's fast. It seems like on a decent workstation it would be faster than a log and transfer of DV or HDV.

The only situations where I see transcode time being a factor is for those jobs where you typically hand over what you shoot immediately after you shoot it. But even in those situations with legacy formats, someone in the production pipeline still must deal with log and transfer, transcoding, etc.. With RED as it becomes more established, you can still work with this approach. You hand them the RED DRIVE, RED RAM, CF, whatever and they process it themselves.

At this stage in the game there could be a little bit of a trade-off in delivery time compared to shooting DV/HDV or even DVCPROHD. But I don't see this as a problem if the client knows this going into it. You're selling them a different product. Sell them on better image quality at little more than the cost of shooting with an HVX. If they can't deal with the having to wait a bit longer for a deliverable, then help them out with that. Offer to deliver immediately and then offer your consulting services to bring their editor or post people up to speed on how to deal with RED footage. This is an opportunity to upsell and offer more services. Not an "oh, my producer is going to flip if he has to wait an extra 10 minutes to convert footage" situation.

This exact same argument came about with the HVX200 and how to deliver what was shot on P2 in different formats or on different media instead of $1200 P2 cards. People survived and it's now a widely accepted workflow.
 
Dave01 said:
I've got an 8-core mac with 5GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card. Tried rendering out DPX files in both RedCine and Red Alert. Took 20 minutes to render out a 2K DPX sequence from a 1 minute R3D clip. Both Red Alert and Red Cine took the same amount of time. To render out a 4K DPX sequence from Red Alert took me 60 minutes.

Long render time indeed. Can either of these programs make use of a render farm?

Dave
Click to expand...

This rendering should not be that long. HOWEVER, keep in mind that DPX are MASSIVE files. It sounds like you're hitting an I/O limit here on your harddisk.

For Mac OS X users you can see a dramatic slow down when you have an Nvidia graphics card. That's why we advice ATI for that platform.
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
As I said.. I am not complaining to complain. But I am purchasing RED with the idea of working in many different fields.

That said, time matters. I am cool with the output times being slow for projects that require it.. BUT there are EFP times when we need to be able to output an hour's worth of material in 2-3 hours at LEAST.. It's also reasonable to assume that these may be more inline with 2k source files rather than 4k.. But time matters.. A lot.

I am surprise that with 100+ cameras out there, no one has mentioned this with REDAlert. What's the deal? Is that software that much different?

Jay
Click to expand...


I wonder if this will be solved when Red implements 1080/720 RGB on camera..
 
Rob Lohman said:
For Mac OS X users you can see a dramatic slow down when you have an Nvidia graphics card. That's why we advice ATI for that platform.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, all the latest MacBook Pros use the Nvidia card only...and I can confirm it is very very slow.
 
How slow digitalfx? Because I'm using the last version of MB Pro and it has an ATI x1600 Radeon w/ 256 MB ram and it's damn slow as well...
 
rgdfilmsRED said:
How slow digitalfx? Because I'm using the last version of MB Pro and it has an ATI x1600 Radeon w/ 256 MB ram and it's damn slow as well...
Click to expand...

The latest all come with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 256MB SDRAM

I am running speed tests now.
 
Right now I'd recommend everyone use the QT wrappers (instant) to edit from, and then conform via > redcine > AE. It's much less footage to render if you only do it for your online.

_mike
 
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